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What is not up for discussion? The answer to this question defines a political order, and the repressiveness of such an order will depend on where this boundary is set between the discussable and the undiscussable. But it is not as if more discussion necessarily means less repression. Certain topics—genocide, torture, slavery—definitely need to be off the table as legitimate political measures. Other topics—the choosing of rulers and historical facts—need to be discussable in order to avoid tyranny. In between lies a gray area whose definition will establish the character of each political order. Conversely, a lack of consensus on this issue will lead to political instability that goes beyond the content of political debates, indicating that the question of discussability coincides with the problem of political identity. This issue of Telos will consider three areas in which discussability has become the main issue, leading to implacable conflict.
The debate over racism in the United States and in Europe has been plagued by an inability to come to agreement on what is up for debate. Certainly, the legitimacy of racism rates as one of the topics that should not be up for discussion. We can all agree that the defense of racism should not be an available political position to take. While such exclusion should not impair their freedom of speech, defenders of racism should not have a significant voice in our political debates. Yet what divides us are the questions of whether and where racism exists, as well as the proper measures for eliminating racism. The various positions on these questions should be up for debate, and one of the key problems with our current political situation is the attempt to make certain perspectives undiscussable. Without a forthright discussion of these questions, racism cannot be identified where it exists, and policy mistakes will be made that can lead to the continuation or exacerbation of racism.
In his essay and interview, Pierre-André Taguieff addresses this problem by arguing that anti-racism in France has developed not as a reaction to racism but as a consequence of a discourse of postcolonialism that leads to an inability to discuss where racism exists and the proper measures to take. The result is an undermining of liberal republican values. Rather than allowing for the investigation of where and how racism exists today, the anti-racists argue that colonial practices of the past indicate that there is an unredeemable racism that is inherent in “white” culture. By continuing to define social conflicts in terms of race without allowing a discussion of the current sources of racism, anti-racism in France consequently perpetuates rather than undermines racist thinking. Taguieff argues that the racist thinking that is perpetuated is in fact an anti-white racism rather than an anti-Black one. The growth of an anti-white racism risks provoking an anti-Black reaction, leading to the prospect of France moving toward a kind of race-based civil war. Taguieff therefore supports Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to reestablish French nationalism based on the republican tradition and a universalist idea of citizenship. The challenge for France will be to identify and correct problems of equal access to this tradition.
A similar dynamic is playing out in the United States. Kenneth Johnson provides an overview of the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement in which he indicates that the movement has both a wide base of support for the goal of police reform but much narrower support for extending Black Lives Matter into other areas such as gender equality and the expansion of welfare state policies. He points out that Black Lives Matter has moved away from the Black church as well as the strong commitment to nonviolence of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement. As Johnson recounts, the marker of this distance is the way in which only a small segment of Black Lives Matter supporters affirms what he terms a “Marxian-flavored” perspective that includes the call to expand welfare state policies.
Johnson also points out that Black Lives Matter has chosen not to address the issue of Black-on-Black violence, which caused over 2,900 deaths in 2019, while police and vigilante killings of unarmed Blacks accounted for fewer than twenty deaths in that year. Such Black-on-Black violence may be a significant factor in the development of what is called “systemic racism.” This term, which suggests racist policies, in fact refers to statistical disparities between races in terms of outcomes such as relative numbers in prison, in selective colleges, or in well-paid jobs. If certain racial minorities are overrepresented in prisons, or underrepresented in elite colleges, in relation to their share of the population, this statistical disparity is taken to be a sign of racial bias.
Johnson cites the work of Jennifer Eberhardt, who describes how racial bias has become a problem in policing. Her work indicates that there is indeed a correlation between these statistical disparities and bias, but that these correlations are difficult to interpret: “In fact, relying on racial disparities to gauge the quality of policing can be a double-edged sword. The same racial disparities that community leaders cite as proof of racial profiling can be cited by police officers as proof of who is most likely to commit crimes. In Oakland, for example, 83 percent of violent crime was attributed to black people in 2014. That sort of racial imbalance appears in the crime rates of almost every large, racially diverse city in the United States. From a law enforcement perspective, the extreme racial disparities that show up in police stops are aligned with those crime rate stats, validating the focus and scope of their crime-fighting tactics.”[1] Because of the difficulties of interpretation, the racial disparities in police stops and in crime rates do not necessarily indicate that racist bias is the cause of the imbalances. Eberhardt addresses, for instance, the ways in which the presence of the disparity can itself lead to bias: “Because blackness is both statistically and stereotypically intertwined with crime, race can be reflexively treated as a visible marker of criminality.”[2] The statistical overrepresentation of Blacks as the perpetrators of crimes leads to corresponding crime-fighting tactics that target Black violence. Unfortunately, these tactics then affect perceptions and behaviors, creating biases that adversely affect the overwhelming majority of Blacks who are not involved in violence. Eberhardt documents the ways in which biases can skew outcomes against minority groups, but her work also leads us to recognize that the biases themselves may also be an effect rather than a cause of bad outcomes such as high crime rates. In fact, she notes that the biases that affect Blacks may not always be based on white racism against Blacks but on a more general bias that is shared by Blacks as well: “our research showed that black police officers were just as likely as white officers to exhibit less respect to black drivers. The drivers’ race trumped the officers’ race.”[3] Eberhardt outlines some important strategies for reforming policing to mitigate such bias, but this effort will need to address the epidemic of Black-on-Black violence as well, and Johnson consequently calls for initiatives that would support “community uplift.”
The charge of systemic racism attempts to prejudge the true causes of racial statistical disparities by attributing them to an anti-Black racism that may no longer be the primary problem. Shelby Steele attributes this tactic to a kind of longing for a victim status: “Thus, for many blacks today—especially the young—there is a feeling of inauthenticity, that one is only thinly black because one isn’t racially persecuted. ‘Systemic racism’ is a term that tries to recover authenticity for a less and less convincing black identity. This racism is really more compensatory than systemic. It was invented to make up for the increasing absence of the real thing.”[4] If real anti-Black racism has receded, if not in all people then at least in U.S. laws and institutional practices, the idea of systemic racism seems to foreclose analyses of the underlying causes of, and the most effective remedies for, the statistical disparities in, for instance, crime rates and college admissions.
The shift to a longing for a victim status rather than a desire for empowerment coincides with the decoupling of Black activism from the Black church that Johnson describes. As Gary Dorrien points out, our perception of the civil rights movement and of Martin Luther King, Jr., in particular has consistently downplayed the role of religion. Yet it was precisely his commitment to Christian personalism that was the defining factor in the particular success of his activism.[5] In his review of Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry’s edited volume To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorrien praises the long-overdue focus on King’s political philosophy but bemoans the continuing lack of recognition of the centrality of his religious commitments to his philosophy. The key concept is personality, where he insists that “there is no knowing without self-conscious intelligence and that intelligence is nothing without purpose.” The essential coupling of self-consciousness with self-direction establishes an idea of activism that is grounded in a notion of God and human action in which it is not an existing status but a will that is crucial to the shape of the world. The focus on will established King’s insistence on nonviolent direct action and placed the emphasis on empowerment rather than victimhood in the civil rights movement. Consequently, Black activism transformed Black culture and U.S. culture as a whole in a single movement.
King’s theologically suffused political philosophy still offers a key mode for motivating a fundamental transformation in community development. As Sara-Maria Sorentino indicates in her evaluation of To Shape a New World, such transformation is really what is at stake in the attempt to retrieve the theological element of King’s political philosophy. Rather than seeing a gradual development toward a post-racial epoch, Sorentino argues that King’s theology pushes toward the kind of willful action that involves faith in the possibility of a “leap” into redemption. As with the civil rights movement, however, such faith in change would not just be the concern of Blacks but would involve a fundamental reorientation of U.S. identity.
If the question of discussability has dominated the domestic debate about racism, it is always going to be a problem in international relations, where different political systems will naturally be defined by their divergent decisions about discussability. In large measure, the project of human rights has been an attempt to provide a global standard for what should and should not be open to debate. The challenge has been to find the right place to draw the line between a universal morality and acceptable cultural differences.
Our section on Russian politics outlines the challenges that Russia poses to the United States and Europe in this regard, and Marcin Skladanowski’s essay describes the ideological and theological bases for Russian opposition to Western conceptions of human rights and liberal democracy. While the United States perceives Russia as a bad actor in its transgressions against human rights norms, the Russian government under Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church led by Patriarch Kirill have developed a narrative in which Russia is the defender of moral values in politics because it is able to link church and state. This narrative reprises a centuries-old history of attacks by the Russian Orthodox Church against the Roman Catholic Church. Referring to the former as the “true” church as opposed to the decadence of the Latin versions, Patriarch Kirill supports Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, for instance, as part of a theological mission to defend a true morality against the dangers of Western secularization. The human rights response is that state-mandated religion undermines the freedom of conscience that lies at the root of any religion. Rather than promoting morality and cultural particularity, the Russian defense of a state-sponsored religion subverts both. In fact, Patriarch Kirill admits as much in his statement that “[t]here are common points in the moral teaching of various religious traditions, which refer to a person’s conscience, which we Christians call the voice of God in our hearts.” If he were to truly champion the voice of God in our hearts, then his criticism of a kind of law that is only based in human organizations and institutions would also extend to a criticism of Russian state policies that prevent the voice of conscience from making itself heard.
In his investigation of one ideology that motivates Russian politics, Michael Millerman describes how Alexander Dugin’s populism considers every people as a separate basis of cultural, philosophical, and political continuity. This existence of the people becomes for Dugin an existential category based on a Heideggerian conception of Dasein that transcends historical differences. In taking over a Heideggerian framework, Dugin differentiates between authentic people and inauthentic ones. He criticizes the latter for being dominated by different ideologies, including liberalism, fascism, communism, and Nazism. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy, which shifts the question of discussability away from human rights norms and toward an ontological structure that is no longer open to the dynamics of human conscience in facing contemporary problems. In indicating that each people exists within a separate historical trajectory, Dugin suppresses the kinds of interactions that lead to cultural innovation and development, fixing Russian identity within a Heideggerian notion of the people as a “fundamental ontological structure.”
The practical consequence of these attempts to ground a Russian political stance that opposes the global human rights project has been Russian government strategies for undermining liberal democratic politics. Kiran Sridhar outlines the way in which Russia has developed a long-term military strategy that seeks to destabilize liberal democracies through disinformation and targeted yet limited violence. The goal of this strategy is not so much to bring down perceived enemies but to maintain the relevance of Russian power in a situation in which its military capacity has been greatly reduced. In contrast to Chinese attempts to completely hide their attacks, Russia makes sure that its aggression is deniable yet still traceable so that it can still claim to its own domestic audience that it remains relevant as a superpower in global affairs. Though it would undermine the legitimacy of liberal democracies to respond with disinformation attacks of their own, they can distribute accurate information about Russian government corruption and repression, as well as impose sanctions on the individuals responsible for Russian attacks. Like the work of both Patriarch Kirill and Alexander Dugin, Russian military strategy seeks to maintain the domestic legitimacy of Russian national identity by setting it up as an enemy of both liberal order and the global discourse of human rights.
In order to counter this narrative about the supposed repressiveness of the human rights project, the Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights has attempted to maintain the universality of human rights norms while recognizing that as a practical matter they must be grounded locally in each tradition’s conceptions of morality. On the universality side, Robert Deam Tobin argues that in spite of the criticism it has engendered among left-liberal activists, the report provides a solid foundation upon which to defend LGBTQ+ rights as an integral part of universal human rights. The report’s defense of freedom of religion and private property provides the basis for the freedom of conscience and the rights to privacy that guarantee sexual freedom. Moreover, the report’s emphases on dignity and the pre-political character of human rights reflect the language of legal decisions by which gender equality has been established in the United States.
In contrast, Christian J. Emden argues that the commission maintains an inordinate focus on natural law and religious freedom, thereby subverting the proper rational foundation for human rights. Emden’s attack on the report extends itself to a critique of the rejection of rational debate by American conservatism, since “the commission relies on a deeply religious argument for the foundation of unalienable rights that withdraws such rights, as much as any political claim based on these rights, from the need for rational justification.” For Emden, references to Christianity and to a pre-political basis for human rights amount to an abandonment of “the rational giving of reasons that makes a normative political order legitimate in the first place.” Asserting that the report depends upon a religious framework for defending human rights, Emden concludes that the report consequently leaves the definition of human rights open to be defined by each culture in a way that would promote its own religious perspective, as well as its own economic interests.
Christopher Tollefsen responds to Emden by questioning whether reasonableness or rational discourse can serve as the ultimate arbiter of human rights claims in the absence of substantive notions of truth and falsehood or right and wrong. Whereas Tollefsen suggests that the defense of human rights requires substantive moral positions, Emden argues that such justifications would lead to an intolerance toward others and consequently to human rights abuses. His conception of human rights would reject any pre-political or pre-legal claims of rights in order to establish international law as the foundation of human rights and their enforcement within a global legal system. Emden’s view seems to embody the kind of universal secularization that Patriarch Kirill suspects to be the goal of the human rights project. In response, Tollefsen suggests that there is a kind of intolerance built into the championing of reason as the arbiter of moral decisions.
Russell Berman’s rejoinder to Emden delves into the sources of his animosity toward religion, suggesting that they are symptomatic of a segment of left-liberal academic humanities culture that cannot accept substantive moral foundations for human rights. Berman first highlights the ways in which Emden’s essay undermines his own insistence on the rational giving of reasons. Berman provides a patient demonstration of how Emden quotes out of context, ignores the plain meaning of texts, and resorts to ad hominem attacks. The report’s defense of religious freedom becomes in Emden’s account the suppression of other people’s religions or their atheism. The call to consider human rights concerns in all aspects of U.S. foreign policy becomes a wish to abandon all human rights. The recounting of the U.S. struggle to abolish slavery becomes a championing of American exceptionalism. Berman explains these distortions as the result of an approach that dismisses competing viewpoints and suppresses cultural difference in favor of discursive uniformity. Emden’s appeal to rational debate that prohibits substantive moral commitments not only suppresses specific traditions but betrays a separation of theory and practice that fails to take into account the political nature of struggles for human rights.
The affirmation of rational discussion and legal institutions over all substantive morality leads to its own forms of blindness and intolerance, which Mark S. Weiner discusses in his review of Fred Siegel’s The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump. As Siegel argues, the establishment of the policies of a liberal technocratic managerialism represented the triumph of rational discourse, but rather than solving the problems of the world, this victory led to the growth of an underclass that accepts the victim status attributed to it by elites. Siegel links this technocratic approach to the Rawlsian attempt to set aside substantive moral commitments, leading to the de-valorization of middle-class values. Rather than conceiving of virtue and justice as moral concerns that must be grounded in the beliefs of the entire population, the attempt to replace moral commitments with rational discourse and legal institutions ends up undermining the popular basis of such institutions.
1. Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do (New York: Penguin, 2020 [Viking, 2019]), p. 68.
2. Ibid., p. 93.
3. Ibid., p. 86. On this point, see also David J. Johnson, Trevor Tress, Nicole Burkel, Carley Taylor, and Joseph Cesario, “Officer Characteristics and Racial Disparities in Fatal Officer-Involved Shootings,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, no. 32 (August 6, 2019): 15877–82. This article was retracted on July 10, 2020, because, as the authors note, “our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements.”
4. Shelby Steele, “The Inauthenticity behind Black Lives Matter,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2020.
5. On this point, see also Marcia Pally, “‘Peculiar Relations of Affectability’: Peirce and Royce as Resources for the Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Telos 182 (Spring 2018): 161–82.
